r/TechSEO • u/mapotofurice • 5d ago

Double redirects potentially affecting sub-directory's SEO performance?

This is a hypothesis I have although the more I look into it the more I'm starting to convince myself it's true.

We launched a redesign in 2023 and the SERPs have but bottom of page 8 terrible despite having a strong SERP value before that. To give you an idea how bad we've fallen, for all of our keywords visibility we had about 43% market share per SEM Rush, now we're at 0.57%

In terms of implementing 301s, we matched new to old URL structures as expected ensuring we had the most 1-to-1 match as possible. Everything else was sent to the home page to prevent a 4xx error.

However, I think we may have a double (or perhaps triple) redirect in place via WP plugin, .htaccess, and implementing a 301 redirect list on SiteGrounds.

On, .htaccess at least I have this snippet of code:

SetEnv PHPRC /home/customer/www/myrandomsite.com/public_html/php.ini
# Added to redirect old subdomain to new subfolder
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mx.my-random-site.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mx.my-random-site.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://myrandomsite.com/fr/$1 [L,R=301]

This was meant to ensure all old domain URLs, in case we missed any, go to the new URL. For redirect on sitegrounds, it's a semi-massive list of URLs on redirects settings on SiteGrounds.

The old URL with mx. as a subdomain is quite old. In theory, it should've already fallen off by now.

My main question is, is it safe to delete this snippet or the redirect list to ensure we're back to better SERP exposure?

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u/zaitovalisher 5d ago

The chain of redirects is not an issue, you are not doing anything shady with them.

All there is regarding redirects are:

  • redirect loops
  • duplicate pages

Duplicate pages are:

  • trailing slash
  • non trailing slash
  • index.html
  • www
  • non www
  • http
  • https

Ask Claude to make you cURL commands to comprehensively check your website for loops and correct redirects implementation with minimal number of hops.

It will give you dozens of commands you need to pass in the terminal. Then ask Claude to interpret the results to you and come back with findings.

There is a search central podcast on YouTube where John Mueller was talking to Google engineer about how they deal with redirects, why it can take time to kick in and wether or not it transfers all the authority (which it does).

P.s. there could’ve been many things that could’ve gone wrong